My brother had a Peavey Falcon Custom electric guitar and pawned it for $100, and was going to just leave it default. I told him I would have given him the $100 for that guitar. It was better than my Horizon II. He offered to sell it to me for $125. I took my Horizon II down to the guitar store where I was taking lessons. I put it up for consignment telling them I wanted $125 out of it. It sold quickly. I went to pay my brother the $125 for the guitar, and found my mom had paid him the $125 and bought me the guitar as a birthday present. So now I had a new guitar and $125. My brother also sold me his Rockman Soloist. The Peavey Falcon Custom was basically Fender Strat Clone. I bought a Seymour Duncan Jeff Beck pickup and had it installed into the bridge position. The work was done at the guitar store where Iwas taking lessons. They were very nice and only charged me for a basic pickup install even though they had to route out the guitar to install the double coil pickup where a single coil pickup used to be. The guitar sounded awesome with that pickup. Fantastic harmonics. Somewhere out there is a Peavey Falcon Custom with a Seymour Duncan Jeff Beck pickup installed in the bridge position. I can’t imagine there would be more than one like it!
Now having an electric guitar, I wanted to learn how to play it. I bought a book by Alren Roth, and started learning some basics. But I wanted to take some lessons. Having experienced the group lessons with the Michael Row Your Boat Ashore strum strum strum stuff, I was a bit leary. I visited a local guitar shop located in Federal Way, WA. Not sure if they are still there. I inquired about lessons, and from what I remember, they cost $30/half hour. That’s what I remember, but that seems kind of high, but maybe that’s right. I decided to try them. I signed up to take a half hour lesson each week. The teacher Scott, started teaching me basic rock and blues stuff. I started learning Ted Nugent, Credence Clearwater Revial, and Eric Clapton stuff. The Nugent stuff was fun to play, but I broke a lot of strings with all the bending. I was started to listen to stuff like Yngwie Malmsteen, Ozzy Osbourne with Randy Rhoads, Metallica, etc. But especially a lot of neo-classical heavy metal.
I studied with Scott for about a year, learning songs, and scales, and modes. It was alot of fun. I really wasn’t very good. But I enjoyed myself.
After a year or so, Scott passed me on to another guitar teacher named George. George was more into the neo-classical heavy metal that I wanted to play.
Things started out good with George and I was learning some cool stuff. But George wasn’t as good of teacher as Scott. George was trying to teach me Rosanna by Toto which had some fairly complex chording. First it was a tough song to play, second, I wasn’t that interested in learning. So each week for a month George would have me working on this song that I really didn’t have much interest in learning. I stopped going to lessons.
Years later, I bought my first electric guitar. I bought it used in a pawn shop for $200. It was a Peavey Horizon II. I had read somewhere that Peavey made inexpensive, but good quality guitars. I couldn’t afford a really good guitar at that point in my life. They had some SG style guitars in there for not much more mioney. I kick myself now wondering if they were actually Gibson SGs. If they were actual Gibsons, I would have been better off buying one of those. Oh well. Chances are they were cheap knock offs. But the Horizon II sounded great. As far as electric guitars, that particular pawn shop always seems to have a good selection at pretty prices. Maybe next time I am back in the Seattle area, I will stop in and see if they still have any good guitars in there. Who knows, maybe I can find a Gibson SG hanging on the rack?
When I was a kid, I asked for an electric guitar for christmas. I had seen one in the Sears catalog. I know now that it was probably cheap junk, but what did I know then? My parents promptly bought me a piece of junk acoustic guitar that kept breaking at the neck. Chances are my dad bought it at Sears where he worked. It may have been a return, or damaged to begin with. They probably bought it to see if I would actually play the thing and practice. Or maybe they didn’t want to be hearing an electric guitar blasting away in my bedroom. I did manage to get some sort of electric guitar sounds out of the thing by dropping a cheap microphone into the sound hole which then I would plug into my stereo and crank the mic input to get the distortion. I would get lots of screaming feedback, and not the good kind. More like and ear piercing, just kill me now kind.
Then they signed me up for guitar lessons where they were teaching us how to play Michael Row Your Boat Ashore… Needless to say, I never practiced. I wanted to learn how to play Bachman Turner Overdrive and stuff like that, and here I was learning to play (or they were trying to teach me how to play) the strum strum strum strum, chord change touchy feely crap! Oh well. The guitar broke, was fixed, and then I don’t remember what happened to it. I think it might have broken again.